“Bloggishing” is what I call the portmanteau of “Blogging” and “Publishing,” in which the act and form and forum of writing a blog combines intimately and immediately with the process of on-line publishing, editing and proofing. During the production of a blog article, or “text,” the dual split processes of writing and publication are almost directly feeding back and forth from beginning to end, and leads to a creative process that cannot be easily or well-achieved otherwise. And yet the products, the “texts,” that appear of value now, today, will be soon replaced with something brand new, totally different, and hopefully better, tomorrow or the next day and then after the next. The blog is thus not a traditional “text” in any conventional sense as we grew up taking it for granted, but a central mechanism for the development and communication of a contemporary symbolic framework for integrating ideas, knowledge and information into a single “system of digital meaning” with hopefully significations extended beyond its literal or even its literary value.
This has about the 5th or 6th time over the past twenty-odd years that I’ve tried to consistently blog. I’ve always found it an interesting new way of writing and textual communication. Trouble has been that all I wrote on various blog platforms was lost due to the system updates and systems outdatedness with lack of updating, ultimately rendering the site useless and the content irretrievable. I’m giving it one final go. Perhaps anything published to the Internet has been meant to be something of ephemera, always at least continuously changing on a dynamic, “epigenetic” information landscape.
Perhaps we of the now older generation were raised with a sense of “classic” texts of many (infinite) possible variations. We were cultivated with the vague idea and ideal that text might be, would be, could be, something of lasting, permanent value. That text could be anything but permanent, here today, for the now, but disappeared, virtually vanished by tomorrow, as something, anything, but mainly of temporary, transient, waxing and waning forcefulness, is something new (and possibly unsettling for older folks) about our Brave World of tomorrow’s possibilities more than yesterday’s epigraphs and testaments and memorials. We sextagenarians were not meant by grand design to inherit tomorrow’s world.
The hopeful sign seems to be this system does only a few things, like publishing blog articles in ascending order on the top page. It seems simple enough (simplicity oft seems to work best with complex systems), perhaps as something not requiring too many constant updates to remain minimally functional. (At least I can easily see the “save” button.) I must apologize—but this is a one-way publication forum for others to read but not to scribe or subscribe to it. If one wants to be a participant in a broader public forum, then I would recommend getting a Facebook account that can be much better managed.
The object of this forum is the consistent writing, publication and feedback of short blogs defined as anything (more or less than) five or six or so well defined and structured paragraphs, exploring a central but complex topic in a hopefully subtle and sophisticated if not sublime but relatively dense manner. The purpose is the experimentation and exploration of different “textualities” as a new forum of communication and self-expression. Immediate editorial feedback and publication permits the rapid development of the text toward some final (but unreachable) state. Writing in this regard may be not so much a product as a progressive process toward some near-finished state (or at least toward a half-finished set of statements.) Here is my first blog piece, and it is the way I roll.
The writing of blogs in the contemporary world, for a potentially worldwide audience, recommends to interested people at least some kind of normative set of qualitative standards of what makes good blogs good and better blogs better. Someone else can carry through with rational end-states and reasonable, realistic limits, beyond blogging itself. Certainly blogging has its own stylistic and structural considerations—sentence, paragraph and essay as a whole becomes structured through the process of its immediate publication, in competition with the rest of the worldwide web itself.